Strata Cleaning Norwest

Strata cleaning Norwest owners corporations pay for is one of the few line items on a levy notice that every single owner walks through twice a day and forms an opinion about. It is also, in most schemes, the line item nobody looks at again after the contract is signed — until an owner stands up at an AGM and says the lobby looks tired, which is usually about two years too late to be a cheap problem.

Norwest now has real strata. Residential towers have risen around the metro station on the Sydney Metro Northwest line, and a large part of the business park is office strata — buildings carved into lots under an owners corporation rather than let whole to one tenant. Both produce common property, and both produce a committee that would like to know what it is buying.

The boundary, first, because it is where money goes missing

Before anything is priced we mark out what is common property and what is not. Lobby, lift cars, lift lobbies on every level, corridors, fire stairs, mailroom, bin room, shared amenities, basement — in. The inside of a lot, a private balcony, an owner’s garage bay — out. This sounds pedantic until you meet a scheme where the cleaner has been mopping a commercial lot’s entry for three years because it looked like part of the lobby, funded by everybody’s levies.

Traffic, not the calendar, sets the schedule

An office strata lobby in Norwest is destroyed between eight and nine in the morning and is empty by seven at night. A residential lobby is used all evening and all weekend. The same building fabric, completely different schedules — and a contractor who runs both to the same roster because the roster is convenient will be visibly failing one of them. We scope the frequency per area against the traffic that area actually gets, which sometimes means daily on the ground floor and weekly on level nine.

Fire stairs, bin rooms and basements: the three that get skipped

Ask a Norwest committee where their previous cleaner cut corners and it is always the same three places. Fire stairs, because nobody uses them until they do, and because they are a genuine slog. The bin room, because it is unpleasant and because a cheap scope quietly omits washing it down — and the bin room is precisely what determines whether the lobby smells. And the basement, because sweeping or scrubbing a car park is real machine work, not a mop-and-bucket job, and because most people rationalise that a car park is allowed to look like a car park.

All three are on our scope by name, with their own frequency and their own line. If a competing quote does not mention them, they are not being cleaned, and the price difference you are looking at is precisely the cost of not cleaning them.

The monthly report, which is the actual product

Once a month a named supervisor walks the Norwest scheme against the agreed scope and writes down what they found. That report goes to the strata manager or to the committee, and it includes the misses — the things our own cleaner did not do well enough. Committees find this startling, because the normal experience of a cleaning contractor is that you hear from them when there is an invoice and when there is a complaint. A contractor reporting its own failures monthly is a contractor that cannot quietly drift, which is the whole point.

One contact, please

The single fastest way to destroy a strata cleaning contract is to have six owners ringing the cleaner directly with six different priorities. We ask the scheme to nominate one person — usually the strata manager or the building manager — and anything outside the agreed scope goes through them, so it is authorised rather than absorbed. It is not bureaucracy; it is the only way the scope stays a scope.

Call 1300 494 983 and we will walk the whole scheme, including the parts the last contractor did not.